Posts Tagged ‘Australia’

An inquiry has been launched over a number of societal problems including sex slavery and forced marriages, which are still persistent in Australia.

The NSW Community Relations Commission is holding an inquiry into human trafficking and many other issues, of which there are an estimated 1000 cases a year in Australia, NSW Minister for Women Pru Goward has said.

Goward said that victims of trafficking are often forced marry men they may not know, in some cases by threats of rape or murder aimed at them or their families.

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“I was really overwhelmed and touched, but also angry — 100 emotions went through me about what I read in this book and I just wanted to do something about it,” she says.

Ms Lorenzo channelled her newfound passion and started Project Futures, a not-for-profit organisation based in Sydney.

“We raise awareness and funding to support anti-trafficking projects that we believe are in need of support,” she says.

Money raised by Project Futures goes directly to organisations working with trafficked women and girls: The Somaly Mam foundation in Cambodia, the Salvation Army safe house for trafficked women in Sydney and Child Wise in Melbourne.

Somaly Mam is currently in Australia for a 10-day tour to support Project Futures and help further raise awareness of human trafficking. Click here for a full list of public events.

It’s feared the mining boom is leading to an increase in the exploitation of women in the sex industry.

Increasingly, sex workers are travelling to Australia’s remote mining communities, hoping to cash in on the lonely, mostly male workforce.

But a senior Queensland police inspector says there’s a growing problem with women from overseas arriving under-prepared and being exploited by criminals.

David Lewis reports.

DAVID LEWIS: Mount Isa Mines in the remote north-west corner of Queensland has been operating for almost 90 years. The surrounding city has grown steadily over time as more and more people chase the huge salaries on offer in the resources sector.

Sex workers have also been a major beneficiary of the boom, but there are now concerns about the health and safety of women being brought in from overseas.

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A human-trafficking network has reportedly been targeting Tamil refugees in southern India, promising them safe passage across the Indian Ocean and Australian citizenship on arrival.

Refugee advocates said that at least two boats carrying up to 50 people have disappeared off India’s south coast late last year, The Age reports.

According to the report, in the past six months, the number of boats leaving Sri Lanka and southern India for Australian territorial waters have increased with boats intercepted in the past three days at Ashmore Islands, Christmas and Cocos Islands.

This year, 708 people claiming to be from Sri Lanka, many arriving in boats from India, have arrived in Australian waters, the report said.

The UN estimates that more than 140,000 Sri Lankan Tamils have been displaced across 65 countries.

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Foiling a massive human-trafficking bid, the Kerala Police on Sunday night took into custody 150 Sri Lankan nationals, including 19 women and 22 children, who were to be taken to Australia by sea. The Sri Lankan nationals were taken into custody from Aravila quay at Kavanad in Kollam.

The police had first taken 14 Sri Lankan nationals into custody on the basis of information provided by the local residents of sighting them in suspicious circumstances. The rest of the Sri Lankans were found packed onto a small boat with no basic amenities during a joint search conducted by the Coast Guard and Kollam police.

Police officials said on Monday that the boat had been confiscated and the Sri Lankan nationals including the women and children had been put up at a police camp since Sunday night. They said the boat’s driver and four others jumped off it and swam away when the coastal police spotted the boat.

The detained Sri Lankans said that the human-trafficking agents, who had taken Rs 100,000 to Rs 500,000 from each of them, had promised to reach them to Australia by sea in 18 days. They were also told that they would be transferred from the boat to a ship at mid-sea.

In Australia, new legislation aims to combat organ trafficking, forced marriage and forced labor by broadening laws against slavery and exploitation, a plan that was heralded by human rights groups as a blueprint for world efforts to stop such abuse.

“Tragically, 19th century slavery has not been abolished,” Australian Atty. Gen. Nicola Roxon said,Agence France-Presse reported Wednesday. “It has simply taken other forms.”

Traffickers have funneled men and women from India, China, South Korea, the Philippines and other countries to Australia to force them into work varying from prostitution to construction.

Stories of abuse have been reported by Australian news media. In one case, a Thai woman was reportedly recruited to be a sex worker, then forced to pay off a hefty debt to her Canberra recruiter. In another, a woman was flown from the Philippines to harvest her kidney, allegedly without fully agreeing to do so.

HAYDEN COOPER, REPORTER: In the teeming, dusty streets of Islamabad, most Pakistanis scratch out a difficult existence. It’s a world away from life in Australia, so the dream of migration keeps Australian officials busy, processing a constant flow of visa applications.

FORMER VISA OFFICER, AUST. HIGH COMMISSION, ISLAMABAD: Every single day, five days a week from eight in the morning until five at night, it was – and often with overtime. It was hard work.

HAYDEN COOPER: This former Immigration Department employee wants to remain anonymous. She worked at the Australian High Commission in Islamabad. Her job was to process visa claims and now she’s speaking out to reveal the extent of visa fraud in the region.

How widespread is this as a problem for Immigration officials?

FORMER VISA OFFICER: Very widespread. It came into my office on a daily basis.

HAYDEN COOPER: One of the most common complaints is of Pakistanis who claim to be Afghans. The method is simple: buy identification documents at the local Afghan consulate in Pakistan, then apply for a visa in Australia.

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Australia’s Federal Police are warning that people trafficking is becoming an alarming and growing trend. While most of the focus is on the smuggling of foreign women into Australia’s sex industry, senior officers say there has been an increase of “slave labor” into other sectors, including construction and manufacturing. Federal officials have held a series of forums around Australia to help state and territory police identify both traffickers and victims.

Most of the women trafficked into Australia come from Asia and Eastern Europe. They are often tricked with promises of a well-paid job or a place at college, but end up in sexual servitude. There is also evidence that this type of trafficking is increasing in other sectors, including agriculture and manufacturing.

Victims are often too scared to go to the authorities out of fear of deportation or because of threats against family members.

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Australian authorities say human trafficking is becoming an alarming and growing trend in the country.

The authorities say that while the focus is mainly on the smuggling of foreign women into Australia’s sex industry, there has been an increase of “slave labor” into other sectors, such as construction and manufacturing.

The trafficked women are mostly from Asia and Eastern Europe. They are often tricked with promises of a well-paid job or a place at college. But more often than not, officials say, they end up either in sexual servitude or working in what is described as a forced labor or slavery-type situation.

CHRIS MCDEVITT: I just want to emphasise that the AFP is not interested in prostitution at all. We’re about human trafficking. What we’re interested in is people who are forced into that, certainly sexual servitude is the biggest side of the business at the moment. We have 167 out of those 187 victims were women and 151 of those were actually from sexual servitude. The rest of those were forced into other labour trafficking situations.

DAVID WEBER: What other kinds of industries are people being brought here to work in?

CHRIS MCDEVITT: Well it’s a raft. I don’t want to silo industries, but we’ll look at all forms of industry. We’ll look at, say, the mining industry; we will look at agriculture. We will look at everything that’s possibly available that people can go into: hospitality, we’ll look at domestic situations.

Look, what we’ve got to do is remember that the people that are involved in this particular organised crime aren’t fools. They are very alive to what police methodology is, they’re very alive to trends. They look at the success and the failures of judicial processes and then they change their tactics, just as quick as they get caught they’re changing their tactics. We need to be alive to that.